Former Penn State administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are asking a judge to delay their perjury trial set for January in Harrisburg because their attorneys need more time to review hundreds of thousands of documents to build their defense.

Former Penn State administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are asking a judge to delay their perjury trial set for January in Harrisburg because their attorneys need more time to review hundreds of thousands of documents to build their defense.

The attorneys for Curley and Schultz filed the court documents earlier this week, saying they already have received 250,000 documents from the Attorney General’s Office and are trying to get more than 8,000 documents Penn State considers privileged information.

Attorneys Caroline Roberto and Thomas Farrell asked for a 30-day delay. Trial is set for Jan. 7 in Dauphin County Court.

The judge, Todd A. Hoover, ordered that the prosecuting attorneys from the Attorney General’s Office must respond to the defense’s motions within 10 days.

“It will be extremely challenging, if not impossible, for counsel to read, absorb, and analyze the voluminous discovery and litigate the complicated pretrial motions that this case will entail with a view to preparing and presenting a coherent defense by Jan. 7,” wrote Farrell, the attorney for Schultz.

Curley, 58, and Schultz, 63, have maintained their innocence against the allegations they lied to the grand jury investigating claims that Jerry Sandusky abused young boys. Sandusky was sentenced earlier this month to 30 to 60 years in prison but is asking for a new trial.

Curley and Schultz also are charged with not reporting to authorities an incident in which Sandusky was seen in a shower in 2001 with a young boy. That was witnessed by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary, who is now suing the university for millions of dollars in damages.

In preparing Schultz’s defense, Farrell said he has subpoenaed Penn State and gotten nine separate responses with materials. An electronic file received on Oct. 5 was 60 gigabytes in size and could contain millions of pages of documents.

Roberto said she has reviewed 65,000 documents from Penn State, and the last batch from the university contained 408 documents.

Farrell and Roberto said they are trying to resolve out of court the issue over the 8,000-plus documents that Penn State considers privileged.

The sheer size of the discovery materials is unlike anything Roberto said she has seen in her 30 years of practicing law.

“The documentary evidence remaining to be reviewed is voluminous,” Roberto wrote. “To compound the complexity of our preparation is the high-profile nature of the case, the ongoing grand jury investigation and the ancillary ‘investigations’ which have focused national attention on this case.”

Roberto and Farrell have a Tuesday deadline to file pretrial motions, and they wrote that their motions include suppressing grand jury testimony, addressing pretrial publicity in the case and motions related to jury selection. The motions could result in pretrial hearings that may cause the start of trial to be pushed back, they said.

Farrell also said the prosecution may call victims of the Sandusky trial to testify and introduce evidence from coaches and athletes about rumors regarding Sandusky. Farrell said the defense team needs to draft pretrial motions on those matters, too.

Sandusky’s attorney, Joe Amendola, asked for delays in the run-up to his client’s trial — to no avail. Amendola often cited the large number of documents he needed to review, and that is one of the reasons he is seeking a new trial for Sandusky.

For Curley and Schultz, they still have motions on the table to have separate trials. The judge has yet to rule on that matter as well as Curley’s and Schultz’s requests to throw out the failure to report abuse charge on the grounds that the statute of limitations expired.